Where Bills Go To Die

Not to beat a dead horse, but can we not agree there’s something seriously wrong with the US Senate? Senators are literally not doing their jobs anymore!

The Hill has a list of the 290 — yes, 290 — bills the House passed that the Senate has not yet acted on. Not “not passed.” These are bills the Senate has done nothing about, including quite a bit of major legislation. This is not even to mention, as Pareene does, the dozens of federal nominees the Senate has exclusive authority to confirm that it isn’t bothering doing anything about.

I know it’s an election year and all, but what exactly are these people doing with their time and on the taxpayer’s dime?

The Road Ahead On HCR

I hope to have more original analysis in the next few days (before the Blair House summit), but in the meantime Jonathan Chait has a great, great post countering all the claims that health care reform is dead.

Update: More.

The Stimulus Worked

As David Leonhardt points out in a great column that’s making the rounds.

Good-Bayh

Evan Bayh announced his retirement from the Senate today. Good riddance. Even though, per Nate Silver, Bayh is a relatively valuable vote when he bothers to vote with his party (rather than undermine it), he’s actually the worst kind of entitled “centrist” whose principles change with the political winds; the worst kind of legacy politician whose celebrity gave him near-perfect electoral security while accomplishing absolutely nothing; and — wouldn’t you know it? — the worst kind of turncoat, who waits until the day before the filing deadline to announce his retirement. Screwing over the Democratic Party: the only legacy Bayh can be proud of.

Josh Marshall sums up Bayh’s oh-so-high degree of integrity nicely:

[L]et’s not paper over the fact that he says our national government is broken. And his decision is to walk away.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like The Senate?

Since we can’t just get rid of the damn thing (outrageous!), Christopher Beam offers eight ways to reform Senate rules, none of which will ever happen, because of Senate rules:

[T]he odds of streamlining the Senate anytime soon are low, thanks to a central paradox: Changing the rules surrounding the supermajority (60 votes) requires an even greater supermajority (67 votes). As of now, the political will simply isn’t there.

Blogs and Pieces

Enough about the “Snowmaggedon” already:

• At the Atlantic, Michael Kinsley makes a great point about the difference between condescension and simply, you know, believing you’re right. Marc Aminder, meanwhile, breaks down Sarah Palin’s paradigm, which is basically appearing as a victim of condescendsion. Imagine that.
• At ThinkProgress, Matt Yglesias throws some cold water on the popularity of the Tea Party movement and tears to pieces Marc Thiessen’s gross dissembling on torture. Thiessen’s angry response is laughable.
• Nate Silver, writing at FiveThirtyEight, proves a point that can’t be made often enough: Obama’s policies have, on the whole, been more popular that not. “[T]he votes taken by the Republican Congress have far more often been out of step with those of the median voter.”
• In New York politics, uncertainty abounds. Governor David Paterson will resign very soon, or he won’t. Hiram Monserrate, who probably slashed his girlfriend’s face with broken glass, may finally be expelled from the State Senate, or not.
• Hipster puppies!

“Words have power. For example, they can be used to tell a pretty enormous lie.”

Tiger Beatdown has a long, interesting, rather esoteric piece on Rahm Emanuel, Sarah Palin, and the use of the word “retarded,” to which I don’t have anything to add except that it would be nice if anything in politics measured up to this level of intellectual curiosity.

Incidentally, more temperate disagreement continues between a reader and I in the the comments of this post.

Quote of the Day

Here’s the President making a timely point on health care reform (emphasis mine):

At the Republican caucus, they held up—they said, we’ve got a plan; it’s going to provide everybody coverage at no cost. And I said, well, if that were true, why wouldn’t I take it? My wife Michelle thinks I’m stubborn sometimes, but I’m not that stubborn. Okay, let me think. I could have everybody get health care coverage that’s high quality, and it’s free, which I’ll bet is really popular. But I’m not going to do that. I’m going to go through the pain of really working through this hard process in Congress, getting yelled at and called a socialist, because I just — that’s how I roll. I’m a glutton for punishment. (Laughter.)

No, look, if this were easy and simple, first of all, somebody would have done it before. Seven Presidents have failed at this; seven Congresses have failed at this. If this was simple, it would have already been done. It’s not.

This much I know to be true: Americans don’t like complication. Which is part of why Obama, the former law professor, loathe to dumb things down, has trouble explaining policy to the American people in terms they can understand. Which is why I thought the State of the Union was mostly successful.

Mark Blumenthal, meanwhile, published a column this week that I think goes a long way towards explaining why Americans are generally against health care reform, until they know anything about it.

Why I Am Not A Conservative

A major topic of this blog since its inception has been the vacuous, uninformed nature of right-wing political discourse. I bemoan this fact because I believe in a robust dialogue, and as a temperament I believe conservatism has much to offer our politics. But what passes for conservatism these days is, in my opinion, a mostly content-free ideology. It’s nice to have this confirmed on my own blog.

A reader named Karl Keller has been commenting, quite passionately, on a few recent posts. I don’t know who Karl Keller is or anything about him, but since I want to take my readers’ dissents seriously, I thought his comments deserve a detailed response, which I try to make after the jump.

(more…)